


The End of the Story

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Angst, Appearances by other delinquents, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Mount Weather, The 100 (TV) Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23693317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: Clarke Griffin, of Mount Weather, meets Maya Vie, of the Ark, in the quiet pause between battles, in the final days of a civilization.And they fall in love.
Relationships: Clarke Griffin/Maya Vie
Comments: 6
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So...this fic. It was supposed to be short lol. (It's not, and neither are these notes; I'm sorry.)
> 
>  **The history** : This was one of my rejected ideas for Round 3 of Chopped 1.0 back in April of 2019. The round's theme was canonverse, and the required tropes were "you're a jerk to everyone but nice to me," "I'm going to kiss you now," hiding in an enclosed space, and two characters switched in canon. I ended up using a different idea (a Raven/Monty fic in which Monty is a Grounder) but never got this one entirely out of my head.
> 
> So I started writing it last November, took several long breaks, saw the word count expand a lot, and now here it is. Along the way, most of the Chopped tropes got dropped: character swap is obviously still here, and now that I think about it so is hiding in an enclosed space (though it's not a scene between the main pairing). But I did not use the other two, which is why this fic isn't in the Chopped collection. But I wanted to give credit where it's due: this fic would not exist if not for Chopped, Sara @thelittlefanpire and Bailey @dylanobrienisbatman. (However, I take full blame if you think 'maybe this shouldn't exist though?')
> 
>  **The length** : I decided to split the fic up into parts but I was really on the fence about it. I'm hoping the structure, and the reasons for the weird pacing, will be more obvious this way. That said, **the fic is done, the total length is about 13k, and it will be posted in its entirety by Monday, April 20** , if you'd rather wait to read it as a one-shot.
> 
>  **The warnings** : If you're comfortable with the content of S2 of the show, you'll be comfortable with the content of this fic. In other words, teenagers and others do get tortured and people are irradiated, but...it's a S2 AU. I would say it's less explicit than the canon.

Clarke hears the rumor at dinner: newcomers have arrived in the Mountain. Not Outsiders, but people from the outside. 

She wonders if this is how her grandparents felt, when they first learned of survivors on the surface, and if the news came to them in the same way: as whispers over appetizers, as a slow fanning out of theories, of possibilities, of wonder. Unlike them, Clarke holds no illusions about her own future—she knows quite well how her story will end—nevertheless she feels herself slowly suffused with awe. Here with them, somewhere, are people who know the ground, who have seen the sun and the sky. 

A spike of curiosity follows, strong enough to make her stomach twist. Who are they, and why have they never been known before? 

She remembers the alert, harsh and blaring in the middle of the day, not a containment breach but a different and unfamiliar warning. _Unidentified aircraft overhead_. It cut off abruptly. A simple and unsatisfying explanation was given. 

The next evening, President Wallace gives a short address, in which he describes the newcomers as refugees. Survivors, he says. Meaning, then, _like us_. 

_We saved them after an attack by the Outsiders. Now we will welcome them into our home._

Refugees, she repeats to herself, quiet and slow at the bottom of her mouth. Victims. Weak enough to need the Mountain. Strong enough to breathe the air. 

That night, Clarke sneaks out of her quarters while her mother is asleep, and into quarantine. Her medical apprentice badge will get her into almost any sector, and the night guard is lazy and trusting. He waves her through the outer door. She smiles at him brightly, pulls on a blue hazmat suit, and waves her key card in front of the thick inner door. It unlocks with a satisfying, high-pitched beep, and she steals in. 

In every single quarantine room, one, two, as many as three people are sleeping. Forty-eight in all. Every single one her age, she'd guess, or younger. A few are injured, but none have the scars and lesions that she's seen on her own people, upon the touch of outside air. 

She stops at the very last room in the hall, stands on her toes and peers through the window, into the bright white room inside. She presses her face right up against the glass. Her own breath fogs up against the inside of her suit. Vincent Van Gogh's _Starry Night_ hangs on the left-side wall, one of her favorites—wasted, she thinks, in the quarantine wing. And on the bed, curled on her side, and wearing standard-issue white clothes that tell Clarke nothing of her origins, her life before, is a teenage girl. Her dark hair falls over her shoulders; her face is half-hidden behind her hand. 

Clarke watches her for a long time. 

She feels herself growing uncomfortably warm in her stuffy hazmat suit, her palms sweat-slick, her view still obscured by the outtakes of her own breath. She is viewing this girl from an impossible distance, from the other side of a chasm, as if the girl were still on the surface, and Clarke herself still trapped underground. She has never yet in eighteen years wanted to see the ground more than she does now, and she understands in a distant way that this is because, until this moment, the world above has never seemed entirely real. 

The girl stirs in her sleep, twists around onto her back, her arm stretching up and then falling over her eyes. She yawns. Clarke's heart stutters, reasserts itself as a frantic beating at her throat. But she does not leave, only continues standing on her toes and peering through the window. She watches as the girl blinks her eyes open, as she starts to stretch, then abruptly stills, the wonder and the fear with which she takes in her new surroundings. How she sits up slowly. How she pushes her hair out of her face and bites her lip. How only then does she turn toward the door, and the little round window, and notice Clarke staring at her. 

She jumps, hand to her chest, makes a noise that Clarke cannot hear. Clarke puts her hand to the glass and tries to wave. She is smiling, but she doesn't know if the girl can see her face through the plastic front of the hazmat suit. 

At first, the girl only stares back at her, utterly still, as wary of Clarke as Clarke is curious about her. 

Then, hesitantly, she raises her hand and waves, too. 

And Clarke isn't certain, but she thinks her heart may be soaring. 

She introduces herself properly at dinner the next evening, after the girl and her friends have been released from quarantine and given their first tour of the Mountain. Unlike some of the others, the girl is eating her meal slowly, pausing sometimes and letting her eyes close, as if she's never had any sort of decent food in her life. Her eyelids are still shut when Clarke slides into the seat across from her, and she startles again, a slighter shiver than the night before. 

"Sorry," Clarke says, and smiles at her. "I didn't mean to surprise you." She hesitates, then adds, "Last night, either. I'm Clarke." 

She holds out her hand, and the girl puts down her fork and slides her palm neatly against Clarke's. Her hand is warm and a little rough, and the handshake lasts longer than it needs to. "Maya," she answers. "So—that was you in the hazmat suit?" 

"Yeah. I can't go into the quarantine areas without one. I'm sure they told you on the tour—we're strict about security around here." 

Maya nods, her thoughtful expression edging into a smile. "Is that one rule even a rule-breaker won't break?" she asks, and Clarke feels her heart jump again, her own face splitting into a grin. 

"Am I that obvious?" 

"A bit." She sets her fork down, rests her hands in her lap, her gaze for a moment downturned. "This outfit looks much better on you." 

A warm blush spreads across Clarke’s cheeks. This unaccountable heat is unfamiliar—so too the secret tone in which she hears herself murmur, “Thanks.” Then she leans forward, her arms crossed on the tabletop, and pitches her voice a little lower. A certain giddiness, a certain pleased feeling, a rising excitement, is growing in her. She’s sure Maya can see it across her face, hear it when she speaks. "It's just that we've never had anyone like you in the Mountain before,” she says. “Wallace said that you and your friends are descended from the space station survivors. Until you showed up, we didn't even know anyone was still living up there." 

At this, a brief sadness shades across Maya's face: a distant expression, which makes Clarke hesitate. 

"Yes," Maya says, after a moment, "well, not anymore." 

Clarke opens her mouth, not yet sure herself if she wants to offer an apology or a consolation, but Maya shakes the moment off. "We didn't know there were survivors in Mount Weather, either," she says. Her gaze drifts up again, taking in the tables around them, the art on the walls—then up and up, to the flags hanging above. 

"We were told no one had made it here in time,” she says. “We were told we were the only ones left.” 

Clarke follows her gaze. She has never before heard a voice so completely, so desolately lonely, a voice like the surface appears in her more wretched dreams. So now for the first time she imagines a space beyond the Earth itself, sees in her mind a picture of the eternity of stars above. 

* 

At night, in the soft and malleable space that is not quite sleep, Maya traces their path again, imagining it as a great, curved line: from the sky, down to the ground, and now under the ground. Burrowed deep in the dark, small, safe underground. And only forty-eight survivors, as far as she knows. 

A strange feeling, to be one of the people who lived, alone among the whole once-claustrophobic, once-overrun population of the Ark. Humanity as a whole has proven itself hardy, surviving above and below, through catastrophe that should have destroyed the totality of them. Each small remaining faction believing itself for a time to be the only one. And yet each of them by itself is so frail. Each group's hold on its own survival is so tenuous, and her little family of forty-eight could so easily be zero, and she feels perhaps as the last Grounder generation felt, except buried beneath the earth instead of stranded too far above and looking down. Like them, she wonders if her own life can be a bridge to something greater, or if she will only be one of the last, and no one after even to remember her. 

She thinks about the Ark stations falling like stars, toward the ground, but she cannot let herself believe that anyone was inside, that anyone lived. As sleep settles over her, and later, in the morning, as dreams she won't remember fall away, she thinks about those streaks of light again and again, those trajectories of fire. Over two thousand people, waiting to come home. 

But under the Mountain they are only forty-eight. 

She sits up in her top bunk and looks around, at everyone else still sleeping, at the light grays of the walls and the dulled blue of her blankets. From here, the forest and the ruins of the dropship camp—her last sight of the ground—feel eons away. As if she's lived many lives within her one life. 

And in this life: a pale purple dress and old barrettes to clip back her hair, the sort of carefully shined brass that would cost a fortune in rations in the market, and slip-on shoes with well-worn treads. And the sound of the dormitory door as it opens, not surprising her, but awakening a bright anticipation in her, even before she turns around. 

She and Clarke have made a breakfast date. 

The phrase is Clarke's, but Maya is the one to reach for her hand across the table, in a pause of conversation that has left them both on the edge of nervous laughter. She has a feeling that Clarke has never known this sort of hesitance before: a silence that cannot be filled, that is not awkward, that is meant for communication without words. She always seems to know what to say. 

Clarke is too big, Maya thinks, for the underground. Clarke and her bright blue eyes and her waves of blonde hair and her habit of sitting very still as she talks, moving only when she leans into Maya's space, her gaze so unwavering and so insistent that Maya cannot look away—the unrepentant intensity of her. She states opinions as if they were facts and her questions sound like an interrogation, though there is no malice to them, only a ragged impatience that makes Maya smile. When Maya's hand touches Clarke's hand, she pauses, then reaches up to run her thumb across the side of Maya's hand. Her skin is cold and pale from a life without sun. 

After breakfast, Clarke leads her on a second tour of the Mountain, a private tour: mostly an excuse to walk together, hand in hand. They stop by the library, the school, the farms. They peer down the hall toward the president's suite. In the gray corridors, their footsteps echo against the concrete. Clarke's palm grows slowly warm against her palm. 

"President Wallace was the first person to take the art out of storage," Clarke tells her, as they stand in the middle of a gleaming white hall, in front of a landscape of meadowland and wildflowers. "The Last Cabinet brought everything down here before the war, to keep it safe. All of the great masterpieces. Or as many as they could." Her voice turns wistful and quiet, so soft for a moment that Maya leans in, unconsciously, to hear. Clarke's eyes flick across the landscape with unsettled interest, as if trying to take in every detail, every bit of wild color in the paint, every careful brush stroke, all at once. "They're safest in the warehouse rooms," she adds. "But President Wallace says that we deserve to be able to see them. They're useless just hidden away, and out here, on display—they're the closest we have to windows on the outside world." 

Maya stares at the painting with distant curiosity, seeing not the bent flower stems and the endless illusion of the grass, or the smudged cloud sky or the small barn on the horizon edge, but the shape of Clarke's words, blending in with the muted colors, the yearning softness of her voice in the pastoral scene. She turns, slightly, takes in Clarke's profile and her focused, insistent gaze. She doesn't answer, and after a moment, Clarke starts talking again. 

"I think he put them out because he's seen the surface," she says, a slight stop around the first words, the barest reluctance. "When he was a boy. But it's not viable. He'll never go out there again—he knows it will take a lot longer than they thought it would. When they put all the art away." 

Clarke has already explained to her, in the simplest and most unemotional terms, why the ground is safe for Maya and her people, but not for Clarke and hers. But she turned the conversation away before Maya could ask any questions, or express any sorrow or sympathy. Now Maya sees, for the first time, a window cracked, a way in that is no bigger than the small, narrow landscape itself. On the other side, confusion, turmoil still without words. 

"So why not have it out?" she's saying. "Who are we saving it for?" And tries to smile. Her hand squeezes Maya's hand, and she looks at her for the first time in a long time, and adds, "I guess this one isn't really to your taste, though?" 

Maya smiles and ducks her head, called out, lightly embarrassed, looks up and at the landscape again, and, "It's... nice," she says. "Pretty." 

"But just nice," Clarke answers. "Just pretty." 

Maya shrugs. "I guess I just prefer—" She reaches out her hand, as if she would touch the unprotected paint, the old canvas, or at least the gilt edge of the frame. "This shows us what is. It's literal. My favorite art shows us what's inside the artist... something of their emotions, their fears. What could be. And then when it's depicted and described and you can look at it—face it—" 

She can feel a high color rising in her cheeks. Not many people on the Ark wanted to talk about paintings, or sculpture, or the great masterpieces. She has no practice in this. She doesn't know what to say. 

Clarke is watching her, with narrow, curious focus. 

"I guess you don't need to see a copy of what is," she says. "You've been outside. You've seen the real thing." 

Her tone isn't mean or bitter, not accusatory or offended. Not sad either. Only level and quiet, and though she's not quite right, that for all but a few weeks of Maya's life she knew as much of the ground as Clarke does, knew it only in images and only as the past, she cannot argue. For a single glorious month, she walked in the sun. And disagreement doesn't rankle her. 

"For all we know, down here, this is only the past," Clarke adds. "You said 'this is what it is.' Does that mean this is what it's like now?" 

The meadow, the flowers, the open sky. The house, undamaged, upright. It’s true: she’s never seen such a place. "We landed in the forest," Maya says. "So—I mean, it was different. But beautiful." She does not want Clarke to ask her to describe it, to give her such an impossible task and without warning, so she continues, quick: "On the Ark, we didn't have anything like this. Original art. We only had images in databases. And most people weren't that interested in them." 

A slight furrow creases across Clarke's brow, dipping down between her eyebrows, and her mouth narrows into a thin, disapproving line. Maya could kiss the spot right above her nose, wants to, with a high bubble of desire, out of nowhere and out of place and completely unexplained. She sees all at once that their peoples are alike: offshoots of the same tree, branching out in different directions and in different ways. Clarke's people have concerned themselves, in the aftermath of destruction, with the preservation of art and culture and history, Maya's first and foremost with the preservation of humanity itself. On the Ark, the narrow limits of survival were always paramount: _the laws are as they are because humanity must persevere; lessons are as they are because certain crucial information must be passed down_. Earth Skills, or, instructions for your children's children. Preparation for a harsh planet that we, or they, may someday hope to build upon again. 

Does Clarke know how to track, how to start a fire, how to hunt? If the Ark's people had made it safely to the ground, would they have known what to do with themselves, past survival? Would they have known what they were surviving for? 

"I can't imagine not being interested," Clarke says. 

"Me neither." 

She could tell her about every photograph, every encyclopedic entry, every bit of knowledge wrung out from the library in the in-between hours of the day and late at night. And Clarke could show her every masterpiece, every remnant of a global culture, now destroyed, saved in final frantic moments and sealed away for them. And perhaps Maya will even try to describe what has survived and grown in their absence, what real earth and real grass and real wildflowers look like and feel like and smell like, the impressions real breeze and sunlight leave upon the skin. 

In time. 

She isn't scared down here, and for the first time in her life, she knows no scarcity. So she can afford patience. Yet even then, she cannot stop herself from tucking a strand of Clarke's hair behind her ear, nor from being inspired, by the relieved and lovely smile on her face, from leaning in. The kiss is slow and careful, deliberate and soft. Maya's hands frame Clarke's face, and Clarke's fingers curl lightly into the front of Maya's dress. They stand perfectly still, as if they were posed statues. As if they were bewitched. Only lips move against lips. Then Clarke's hands slip down, and her arms wrap around Maya's waist, pulling her so close that for a moment, the air is swept right out of her lungs. 


	2. Chapter 2

After hours, the library hums with an eerie, abandoned quiet, as if it had already long outlived the people for whom its treasures have been preserved. The lights are off, but large dehumidifiers whir in the corners, and the Mountain's air filtration system sounds with a steady, thumping beat through the walls. Clarke holds her lantern high, casting shadows over the books and the shelves. Each of the volumes is carefully arranged and neatly ordered. Long mono-colored sets extend out toward the far back of the room. 

When she glances over her shoulder, she catches sight of Maya slipping her fingers along the spines with an absent but fascinated touch. 

Finally, they reach the back wall, and Clarke stops so abruptly that Maya almost runs into her from behind. She stops herself at the last moment, but lets her touch linger, anyway, against Clarke's hips. Then she steps forward, presses just so against Clarke's back, rests her chin on Clarke's shoulder. Clarke lifts the lantern up, so that the thin beam of its light illuminates the corner of the room. 

"This is one of my favorite spots," she says, "in the whole Mountain. Especially at night, when I know no one else will be here." 

Maya's arms curl forward around her waist, lightly tugging Clarke back and into her. 

The library is an almost entirely rectangular room, except for this small architectural mistake all the way in the back-right corner, farthest from the door: an imperfection in the wall, creating a tiny reading nook. An old red-satin couch, more beautiful than practical, has been set in against the wall. Above it hangs a framed painting of Washington aflame. The painting was the first piece of art to enthrall Clarke utterly as a child, the first to bring a vision of a wider world to her eyes. The first to make her not simply wonder, in a vague and unsettled way, what might exist outside the Mountain but to make her yearn to understand the world as it was, everything that was destroyed and built and destroyed again, the unbreakable spirit of humanity creating its own doom and still squarely refusing to be doomed. Washington on fire, long before the last war. Washington, barely even built, and then set blazing. 

She'd curl herself into the corner of the couch, wrapped in a blanket, and read for hours, memorize every page of the few art books the library had preserved. 

"It's terrifying," Maya whispers. At first, Clarke has no idea what she means. Then she sees that Maya is staring with intensity and wonder at the painting, her gaze following every red-orange lick of fire as it engulfs the city, as if the destruction were immediate and real and not centuries past. 

"More to your liking?" Clarke asks, with a smile, and covers Maya's hand with her free hand. Presses Maya's hand against her stomach. Thrills at the way Maya's fingers slip absently between the buttons of her shirt. 

"I can see why you like it here," she answers. "Feels like..." She slides her hand free, slides her palms without hurry, teasing, back along Clarke's hips, then slips around her until they're standing face to face. Pricks her fingers against the waist band of Clarke's pajama pants. "Feels like we're safe and alone, in this... perfect pause of history where nothing can hurt us, nothing can interrupt us..." 

The soft rose color that spreads across her cheeks makes Clarke think of the clear rays of the sun. How she has always imagined the sun. 

So she kisses Maya's cheek first, and then her lips, feels the way Maya giggles, breathlessly, against her mouth. Clarke walks her back until Maya's knees hit against the side of the couch. Her arm falls down to her side and the lantern swings, and its light flails erratically over the concrete walls and the looming silver shelves. Maya's hand is splayed across her lower back. Clarke arches into it, and parts her lips, the palm of her free hand resting with unaccountable lightness against the side of Maya's face. 

When she pulls back, she sees that Maya's skin, as lit from below by the wisps of lantern light, is thinly bronzed from her weeks on the surface, that her eyelashes are dark like her hair and her eyebrows, where they flutter briefly against the delicate skin beneath her eyes. And she is so beautiful. Clarke's breath hitches, and she realizes that she has never felt this way in front of a real person, a true living person she can hold in her arms, ever before, and that she wants to preserve this moment for the rest of her life. She lifts the lantern again. The dark brown and wide black pupils of Maya's eyes shine in the light. 

"Let me draw you," Clarke whispers. The question formed on its own, a pure bubble of desire expanding and expanding and bursting free, but now that she's asked it, a delayed thrill of nerves comes over her. She's never _asked_ before, just sketches interesting-looking people in her spare moments, with her sketch pad tucked in against her knees. Curved black pencil lines like wafting thoughts, absent and easy. She's never thought of her portraits as impositions, until now, and in the earnest entreaty of her voice and the shy, curious, intrigued expression on Maya's face, she understands that she's requesting a sort of intimacy, her need not only to preserve but to _know_. 

"Draw me how?" Maya asks. She can't keep her hands still. They roam across Clarke's back and over her hips. 

"Like you want only me to see you," she answers. 

Maya hesitates another moment, then nods. 

Clarke sets the lantern down on a free space on the shelf behind her, but this leaves Maya and the couch and the painting, above her, nearly entirely in shadow. They have to experiment for some time before the lighting is just right. Only by dragging two chairs from the research tables—one for the lantern, and one for Clarke to sit on—are they able to properly arrange the space. 

Clarke still has an old sketch pad and a pencil hidden away among the art books, from the last time she tried to copy one of the masters before class and ran short of time. When she returns from the stacks, materials in hand, she finds Maya experimenting with different poses on the couch. 

"I feel silly," she says, looking up when she hears Clarke's footsteps. 

"Don't. You don't have to look any certain way, just... however you feel most comfortable." She sits down in the chair, makes a few final adjustments to the angle of the light. "Remember, this is just for me. For us." 

"For us," Maya repeats, thoughtful and low, and lets her gaze drift down to the floor. "Don't start yet," she says, as Clarke turns to an empty page. "I'm still thinking." 

"Take your time." 

Here in the late hours, alone and awake while the Mountain sleeps, she feels as if they really have all night. Perhaps even the rest of time itself. 

When she looks up again, she sees that Maya has brought her legs up, her feet tucked in against the cushions, her body slightly slanted toward the sofa arm: a classic pose. Clarke taps her pencil against her teeth. She glances at the blank page, and then up once more, when she detects movement out of the corner of her eye. 

Maya is slowly unbuttoning her pajama top, her eyes fixed with unwavering stillness on Clarke's face. 

"Like I want _you_ to see me, right?" she asks. Her voice is a steady, rough whisper, just like Clarke's voice would be if she could speak. Clarke nods. She can feel a hot blush turning her own pale skin red. 

Maya keeps the shirt on, but completely unbuttoned, open just enough to hint at the swell of her breasts. Just enough to make Clarke's palms sweat, to make her feel a wild and barely contained desire beating hard like the pulse at her throat. 

"Tell me the truth," she says, later, as she darkens a curve of pencil-line across the page. "Is this the most scandalous thing you've ever done?" 

She'd almost said _the most dangerous_ , but she knows the answer to that: throwing herself through space in an ancient rocket ship was probably more perilous than a secret night out and some bare skin—and anyway, here with Clarke, she must know that she's protected and safe. 

Maya laughs. "I guess that depends on what you mean by scandalous," she says. 

"Sneaking around at night, half-undressed...." 

She glances up, catches Maya's gaze with a sly, narrow look and a half-smile. 

“Mmmm, I've done some sneaking before." 

"Oh?" 

"Kept my clothes on though." She fiddles briefly with the lowest button on her shirt, then remembers abruptly that models are supposed to keep still. "That's how I got arrested on the Ark." 

_Arrested_ , she says, as if this were nothing. Obvious. Clarke lets her pencil drop out of her hand, and it rolls down the page and into her lap. She clears her throat and tries, belatedly, to hide her surprise, although she cannot help but be rattled by such a nonchalant admission of an unexpected past. Except for her dark taste in art, Maya had struck her as sweet and innocent, and the force of this feeling had been so strong that it had distracted her from any number of questions, all of which now crowd her thoughts all at once. 

How Maya came to leave her ship, why all of her companions are teenagers, how they survived with such hardiness in that most dangerous world beyond the Mountain's walls. 

"Arrested?" she asks, all she can manage, but the tension of the word deflates all at once when Maya laughs. 

"Yeah. I guess I never told you—that's why we were sent down to the ground first. We were prisoners on the Ark. Adult convicts are executed. If you're under eighteen, you're just locked up." Her voice trails slightly, the full brutality of her home coming back to her, tripping her up, but Clarke only lets this new information sink in and does not answer. She is sketching again, very lightly and slowly. Trying to give Maya space and quiet to speak when she wants to speak. 

"Anyway, I guess we were the obvious guinea pigs," she says, after a moment. "But don't worry," she adds, with the slightest grin, "most of us were non-violent offenders." 

Clarke smiles, too. "So... what was your offense?" she asks. "Trespassing after curfew with a girl?" 

"Like I'm doing now? No. Trespassing—yes. And destruction of property. I... added some graffiti to a few walls." 

"Oh, so you're a fellow artist, then." 

"Probably not as good as you—" She starts to stand, stretching to catch a glimpse of Clarke's sketch, but Clarke hides the page protectively against her chest. 

"You'll see," she promises, smiling, as Maya settles into position again. She does not pretend her gaze doesn't wander, can't help feeling a bit of pride at Maya's blush. "When I'm done, you'll see." 

* 

The walls of Clarke's bedroom are decorated with sketches: mostly portraits, interspersed with landscapes of the world as she imagines it above. In pride of place above her desk hang two completed drawings, one of a woman Maya recognizes as Clarke's mother, the second, Clarke explains, of her father, who died when she was ten. She won't say much about his passing, except that _the radiation got him_ , and, so fast and low that Maya almost doesn't hear her, that _the treatment would have worked_. Maya doesn't know what the treatment is, any more than she knows the fates of her own parents, somewhere in the sky, through the atmosphere, crashed upon the ground. Letting big questions go unanswered no longer haunts her. She wants to burrow instead into small moments of contentment, like this one, rolled up in Clarke's blankets with Clarke's cold feet pressing against her ankles, Clarke's cold fingers sneaking up under the edge of her shirt. 

"I'm happy right now," Maya says, the words soft against Clarke’s hair. She has her arms wrapped around her; they're wrapped up in each other but somewhere in this tangle of limbs, she is holding Clarke, and Clarke is resting against her with serenity and trust. "I'm just... honestly happy. I could get used to this, you know?" 

"I'm already used to it," Clarke answers. Abruptly, she starts to kick and stretch her legs against the sheets, as if she were swimming, grasping for purchase, and Maya does not understand what Clarke is doing until she finds herself pressed back against the pillows, Clarke on top of her, the curtain of her hair hanging down past her face as they kiss. _Don't let go, don't let go, don't let go_ , Maya thinks, as her fingers trail along Clarke's hips and thighs. Under the heavy, thick blankets, in the safety of the small room, even Clarke's cool body becomes warm. 

Long kisses break apart to smaller ones, to Maya's fingers tracing the line of Clarke's eyebrows, to Clarke's fingers tangled in Maya's hair. 

"Let's not go to dinner," Maya whispers. "Let's stay right here. Let's live here, always." Her voice is breathless and giddy; she does not think before she speaks. 

"Live here?" Clarke echoes. "Always?" She's almost teasing, punctuates her words with small kisses and the curl of her fingers against Maya's cheek. "Right here in this bed and never come out?" 

"Yes. Why not?" She bends one leg at the knee, caging Clarke in, the blanket pulled up like the wall of a fort between them and the edge of the bed. 

But Clarke's smile turns cool, still soft but distant now, tinged with sadness, and her gaze drifts past Maya's eyes, down to her collarbones, as she says, "You're not always going to want that." 

"Hey—" She presses two fingertips to Clarke's chin, tilts her head up again. "What's that supposed to mean?" 

"It means that the Mountain seems like a good place now, like a safe place, where the Outsiders can't get you—" 

"And where there's food and clean sheets and running water—and you—" 

"But you can go outside." 

Clarke pulls away from Maya's touch, from the gentle way her thumb tries to trace across Clarke's lips and chin, and rolls off of her, setting into the space between Maya's body and the wall. The bed is narrow, and they are still close. Clarke wraps her arm around Maya's stomach and presses her nose against Maya's arm. Yet still a cold, rigid ball of nerves has formed in Maya's stomach, and won't ease: the sense of something looming and almost-unsaid, a hazy and unpleasant truth about to become clear. 

"What do you mean?" she says again, dull, even though she knows Clarke means exactly as she said. 

"I mean you can live on the surface. You and your friends. I know someday you're going to want to go out there again. Sometimes I can't—" She nudges closer against Maya's arm, bends her neck and rests her forehead just below her shoulder, hides her gaze. "I can't believe that you aren't trying to leave already." 

For a long while, a few minutes that seep past them like small eternities, only Maya's fingers rubbing circles just above Clarke's wrist, she doesn't answer. She knows exactly what she wants to say. But the words have to run again and again through her mind, so many times that they lose meaning, before she can speak. 

"You don't know what we saw out there," she says, at last. "You don't know what it was really like." 

"No," Clarke agrees. "But if you could find a way to live in peace with the Outsiders, somehow—wouldn't you? Instead of living the rest of your life underground? I would, if I could. All of us are safer down here, but it doesn't matter if—" She cuts herself off, lets out a hard breath and swipes her hair away from her face, and Maya notices that her eyes have briefly closed. "No one was ever meant to live and die down here." 

The last Grounder generation didn't think they'd die in space either, and Maya never thought, until her very last moments on the Ark, that she would ever walk on the Earth. But the future is not only hazy, it is nearly opaque: that's what she's learned. Some days it’s the only thing she knows for sure. 

"Clarke, how many people live in the Mountain?" 

Clarke rolls away and onto her back, far enough away to turn her head and catch Maya's eye. "Three hundred," she says. "Why?" 

"There were over two-thousand of us on the Ark," Maya answers. "Now everyone is gone except the forty-eight of us who made it here. Maybe this is the end for us. Maybe this is where we were supposed to end up, or who we were supposed to be—" Her brow furrows, because this is not quite right; she can't speak of fate or what was _meant to be_ , those concepts no more real than fairy tales, order placed on chaos in moments of blissful retrospect. "What I mean is, maybe we're not people of the Ark anymore. Maybe we're—you're people." She finds Clarke's hand again, intertwines their fingers. The theory isn't romantic, only practical, but to her mind it has a tinge of longing to it, too. 

Clarke pauses a long moment, her expression thoughtful, but distant, and then answers, "That's what President Wallace wants. That's why you're here." 

She says this as if it were something she knew, though Maya can't tell if she does for sure or if she’s only guessing. Clarke shares all of her opinions and her theories with this same unquestioned confidence. 

"He knows that you and your people have an ability to metabolize radiation that's more advanced even than the Outsiders'. If you join us here, and live with us, and marry us—" 

"Then your kids could live on the ground." 

Makes sense, in a way. Makes an eerie feeling prick across her skin, raises the hair on her arms. They were not rescues, then. They were an escape plan, in human form. 

"Or our grandkids," Clarke says. "It's the best plan we've got but... it doesn't help me." 

She untangles her fingers from Maya's fingers, lies flat on her back with her hands resting, randomly placed, against her stomach. Maya pulls herself up on her elbow and leans over her, trying to search out some meaning in the distant expression on Clarke's face. 

"I'm going to die down here," she says. Her voice is so dull, her words so final, that Maya thinks at first that she believes this with a hardened, pessimistic clarity, that she accepts her fate as a cold, clear fact. But then she adds, thin as a knife's edge, "That's what I've been trying to come to terms with my whole life.” 

Maya opens her mouth to speak, because she feels with outright passion that Clarke is wrong, and also that she is right, all at once, and she wants to hear her arguments in her own voice. But before she can make a sound, Clarke props herself up on her elbows and grabs at Maya's arm. Her movements are so sudden and so forceful that she appears as a woman possessed. 

"You have to promise me," she says, "that if you want to leave, you will. If you get tired of this place and you want to see the surface again, you will. And you won't let anyone stop you: not President Wallace, not his son. Not me." 

She might argue. She considers it. But Clarke says, "Promise," again, an un-bendable order, and her words sound now like a warning, and then, like the scene illuminated at night in a single lightning flash, Maya sees for a split-second the dropship camp again, the grass and the trees and their own familiar tents, spread out around the towering monolith of the ship. And the vision hits like a gut-punch, a full-body yearning for home. 

So she nods. 

"I promise," she says, and does not whisper, and does not shake. Then she leans down again, and pulls Clarke up to her, and kisses her with the intensity of her promise—as if she could just as easily say, _and I will bring you, too_. 


	3. Chapter 3

Anger drives her, more than sense, a willful and stubborn and self-righteous rage, beating like hammers at Clarke's pulse points, as she leads Maya and her friends to the back of the storage room. She _needs_ this. She needs this anger because underneath the hot blast of it is a slippery, thin sheen of fear, which she cannot let herself feel. She does not know what such a motivator would do. 

What she does know: she is tied to Maya now, bound to her in blood, the aftermath of the sort of ancient and instinctive ceremony that people, she's sure, have always known to do and always done—except that her version takes places against the silent, white, sterile backdrop of two infirmary beds. Still, life force twins with life force, and she is always calmed by the sight of thick, dark red blood flowing down a clear tube to her chest. This is an old ritual she knows well. But it falls upon her differently now, a feeling not unlike the one she had at her father's bedside, watching him die, except that this time she will not let the emotion ebb and become only another faded memory, too fragile to touch—it is different, this time, when the full vision of the rite is not obscured. The clear, round tube does not lead from her body and away, into the wall, out of the silent and white and sterile room, into a darkness she has long agreed to let lie undisturbed. Now instead she sees with unbending clarity, all of the details of it, there in the new, pale tint of Maya's face, the high arch of her cheekbones, her thin, forgiving smile. 

The hammer beat does not soften, and her pace does not slow. Nothing need be different now, not yet. She could pretend again not to know all that she knows. But all she can see is the infirmary walls and the unblemished expanse of her own skin, and Dr. Tsing's vacant and falsely benevolent smile. Funny, how she meant to play a pawn. 

And then, instead, she overturned the whole damn board. 

"What are we doing here?" Monty asks, as Clarke pushes her way past an old filing cabinet, and brings them up next to a window set into the far back wall. Thin slants of blue light filter in through the slatted metal blinds. 

Before she an answer, Maya cuts in, already in her defense: "Clarke said she'd explain—" 

"Well, now's a good time." 

"Yeah." Jasper's voice is less strident, thinned out by nerves. He's glancing around at the dust, the lurking shadows. "I'm pretty sure this is the last place anyone would bother to bug." 

Probably, Clarke thinks. Because it's the last place anyone in the Mountain would ever bother to be, the depths of the depths, not even a good hiding spot for stolen, private moments, because the thump-thump of the fans sounds too loud here, and underneath it are audible little scraps of rattling, of metal, of voices like spirits murmuring in foreign tongues. 

She wonders if the others can hear it. Something has unnerved them—perhaps only her focused stare. Maya grabs for her hand, and Clarke squeezes it so tightly, her own fingers ache. 

"I needed to show you," she starts, marvels to herself that the slick ice of fear, there below the rage she is still fanning, does not break through and break apart her words. "I needed to show you how we survive down here. The radiation seeps in all the time. Regular decontamination sweeps and vigilance aren't enough. Anyone who's been exposed gets treatments, too." 

"Treatments of what?" Jasper asks. 

Maya already knows. "Treatments like the one I gave Clarke," she says, and it's no question, but Clarke still nods. 

"Blood transfusions," she says. "And your blood works really, really well." 

"Wait, I thought Dr. Tsing said she'd never done this kind of thing before," Jasper says. "That it was experimental." 

"And you _believed_ her—?" 

"Maya was the experimental part," Clarke cuts in, and Monty, whose mind must be already racing ahead of her, turns half away and bows his head. "But the rest of it, the general idea... it's decades old." She drops Maya's hand, not because she does not want the contact, but because she is not sure Maya will want to reach for her again. Then she gestures to the window. The others hesitate. She tries again. “Look for yourselves.” 

Closer to the window, the sound of a beating fan gets louder, and the sounds of metal shaking, creaking. 

Clarke watches as first Maya, then Monty, then Jasper, peers through the thin breaks in the slats and into the room below. Clarke already knows what they'll see, and does not need to look again: a tall room, prone to echoes, bathed in blue light, and filled with cages stacked on cages stacked on cages again. Imprisoned in each of the cages, an Outsider, waiting for ritual use. Waiting for cool, unfeeling, simple medical use. 

Maya does not want to look at her, when she steps back, and Jasper cannot seem to stop. 

"I'm showing you this because the radiation leak in the dorms wasn't an accident. Dr. Tsing, and Cage Wallace, I'm sure—they were targeting me. And Maya. They wanted an excuse to test your blood—and now that they know it works—" 

"We're next," Maya finishes. Her voice sounds dull, so unwavering and flat that Clarke is shocked when she crosses the small distance between them and grabs both of Clarke's hands with her hands. She looks up into Clarke's eyes in the darkness and does not let her look away. 

Monty is still at the window. His eyes narrow, flick back and forth in the cool glow. "And you knew about this?" he says. 

Clarke nods. "Everyone knows. We don't talk about it. But we all know." 

"And you just let it go on? You don't do anything?" 

His voice is too loud, sharp and angry, as he turns toward her. Clarke drops Maya's hands and steps forward, meets him face to face, keeps her own words low and urgent, like a warning: 

"And what should we have done? We'd die without the treatments—" 

"Then you should have died." 

_That which does not adapt, does not survive._

Hasn't she always been taught that they did, that this is adaptation, innovation, necessity? And yet her body feels suddenly weak. Riddled with fatal weakness. Maya's hand is at her hip. Monty does not blink, and neither does Clarke. 

Jasper takes a step and raises his hands, palms out, as if he might put himself between them, but Monty interrupts him before he can speak. 

"We need to leave." 

Clarke crosses her arms tight against her chest, bites the inside of her cheek. 

"Is that even possible?" Maya asks. 

"Yeah—suddenly not feeling very much like a guest," Jasper adds, with a thin scrap of nervous laughter under his breath. 

"The Mountain's sealed up tight," Clarke says. Then, after a moment, she allows, "There might be some way, with the right maps, some planning—but that's only if you want to escape by yourselves. I can't get all forty-eight of you out without someone noticing. And once Cage and Tsing find out a couple of you are gone—" 

"It's straight into the cages for everyone else," Jasper finishes. "No. No way. We can't do that to our friends." 

"And even if we did get out," Maya adds, "what would we do then? Where would we go? As far as we know, we’re the only Ark survivors." 

"I'm not in favor of abandoning the others," Monty says. "But isn't it better to be all by ourselves in the woods than in here getting tortured for our blood? I mean, we made a home for ourselves before without any help from the Ark." 

"Sort of," Jasper mumbles. His gaze twitches, jumps, doesn’t quite meet any other gaze. "But, look, we don't know we're the only survivors, anyway. We saw signs of ships coming down before the Grounders attacked. I mean, that had to be the Ark. Maybe some of them made it. Maybe they're out there right now looking for us." 

An uncertain pause, thick like smoke-congested air and hard to breathe, settles in, and all Clarke can hear through it is the beat-beat of her own heart: all that is left of her now-defeated rage. Somehow, she has found Maya's hand again, and one of them is holding on to the other, and she cannot untangle who is who. 

"President Wallace runs surveillance," she says, at last. "Everywhere. He'd be very interested to know everything he could about any other space station survivors on Earth.” She glances from one face to the next, the rest of the offer, the plan, unspoken but heavy in the silence. “I guarantee that if your people made it to the surface, he'd know." 

* 

Maya holds Clarke's hand, palm to palm and fingers twined, as Monty works to break the lock into the President's suite. They are always holding hands now. Always sitting too close together, wrapping their arms around each other, Clarke sneaking out of her room after hours to spend the night in Maya's bed—always finding excuses to touch, as if they feared being apart. As if, should they lose sight of each other, one or both of them might be snatched up and whisked away into the gloom. 

The code breaks; the door beeps. Monty pushes it open, and they slip inside and quickly scatter. 

Monty rushes immediately to Wallace's computer, while Miller pulls a lock picker's tool set from his pocket and sets to work at the drawers of the desk. Clarke starts to examine the bookshelves, to rummage through the scattered papers on the tables, searching out any spot where crucial information might be hidden in plain view. Maya and Jasper take up posts by the door, peering out into the hall for signs of trouble. 

Every moment of near-silence stretches out painfully before ceding to the next. Only their own quiet, searching sounds fill the gap, and the hallway remains just the same, just the same. Each moment the same, and frightfully taut. If the endlessness is to be broken, it will break all at once, and they will have no time at all to save themselves. Jasper cannot stay still on his feet. And Maya cannot move, does not dare to blink. 

Once, twice, she glances back into the room. Clarke is rifling through Wallace's half-finished paintings, so deliberate in her search that Maya almost misses the manic, quick touch of her fingers. The others do not entirely trust her. Miller questions her allegiance, Monty and even Jasper are wary to speak in front of her, even though without her they could not have come this far. She knows more about the Mountain than any of them, and she has a wide network of friends and favors owed, a wide cache of subtle blackmail to use for subtle threats, and those quick fingers have a deft, slippery thief's touch. 

She's not returning to them anything owed. Miller believes her most when he's reminded that _Maya saved my life_ , but it's the other side of the coin that truly motivates her: not what Maya did _for_ her but what her own people did _to_ her. Maya knows this because they spoke of it in grainy whispers, curled together in Maya's bunk, while Clarke stared up at the ceiling and the other forty-seven prisoners slept. _They would have killed me_ , she murmured. As if she were saying: _How can I say I belong with them, and not with you? What loyalty do I owe?_

No more than the hundred owed the Ark that would have floated them, that threw them down with reckless abandon to the Earth. Maya understands the feeling, how new loyalties can grow as quickly as they bury deep. 

She figures Miller would understand, too, if he gave it the right amount of thought. 

Monty’s voice, at first too loud —“ Yes!”—and then forcefully muted —”Got it!"—makes her jump, a thunder of her heart against her ears. All of them turn at once and see him grinning.

Then they rush immediately to his side. Clarke and Maya crowd to Monty's right, Miller and Jasper to his left. On the screen are several large, high quality, color photographs, stacked half on top of each other, overlapping. Monty clicks through them, and Maya sees first a closeup of several members of the Guard, standing next to what appears to be a wire fence; then a wider shot of a rudimentary campsite, busy with people, a hint of silver-gray wall behind; and then a long shot, of the Alpha Station arch, rising with unexpected beauty from the half-tilted wreck of the station—from the ground. 

"That's where you're from?" Clarke asks. She has her arm around Maya's waist, her chin poking against her shoulder. 

"It's where Miller's from," Jasper corrects, and Clarke shoots him a narrow look. 

"It's Alpha Station," Maya says. "Only one of the twelve but... part of the Ark. They made it." 

Here is her future, tilting again, opening up again, finding its way up and to the light and to the great breadth of the earth beneath the sky again. 

"It's huge," Clarke says. "And there are eleven more like this?" 

"Probably not all of them made it," Monty answers. His is tone even, his gaze already darting across the pictures, trying to count survivors or find a familiar face. "But look—there's Vice-Chancellor Kane." 

"Forget about him." Miller edges a little closer to the desk, reaches out past Monty's cheek to tap against the screen. "There's _Bellamy_. The Grounders didn't get him. How much do you want to bet he's out leading the search party for us right now?" 

A new bloom of hope is opening up in Maya's chest, crowding her lungs so that she almost cannot breathe. For a few moments, she will give herself this, this sheer and steadfast hope, and on top of it she'll build determination, insistence, a focus perfect and narrow enough to allow her to forget— 

"Bellamy's your leader, right?" Clarke asks. She sounds thoughtful, as if the next steps of their plan were already unfolding ahead of her. "He's the one we should try to contact. Your people will never find you unless we can reach out to them, let them know where you are and what you're up against." 

"And how are we going to do that?" Jasper asks. 

"We can send out a message over the radio," Monty says. "I'm sure they've got the Ark-wide channel up and running. That would be one of their first priorities, especially if they're looking for the other stations." 

Maya frowns, uncertain. "But how are we going to get to the radio?" 

"It's in the control room," Clarke says. "One of the most heavily restricted areas." She doesn't seem defeated, only intent, and Monty is already shaking his head. 

"As long as I can get to the radio wire at some point between its origin and where it leaves the Mountain—" 

“Hey.” 

Miller, grinning, is holding up a detailed, uncensored, black and white schematic of the Mountain. He’s left the drawer next to him wide open, his lockpicking tools on top of the desk. 

"Would this map help?" 

After a moment, stunned into silence, Monty grabs the page from him, and his own smile grows wide, too. 

"Perfect," he says. "We can do a lot with this." 

Maya pulls Clarke's other arm around her, linking Clarke's hands together at her waist. She can feel every bit of tension in her, so completely that soon, she can no longer tell which nerves are her own and which she only senses from the body close and warm against her side. As Monty and the others pore over the map, she stares straight ahead, at the images of Alpha Station still up on the screen, taking in every detail, tracking colors, counting bodies, wanting to memorize it all. 

When she falls asleep tonight, she wants to see the Ark again in her dreams. 


	4. Chapter 4

"—no choice. We need a spy inside the Mountain. I need to find a way to get in." 

The voice, rough and cragged over Monty's radio, suits its speaker well, Clarke thinks—Bellamy, the leader on the outside. She tries to picture him as he looked in the surveillance photos: dark and sullen and handsome, broad-shouldered, wearing a black and heavy coat. She’d wondered if the surface air was cold. 

Jasper and Monty exchange looks, and Maya opens her mouth as if to speak, then closes it again. They are alone here, in the dark and musty quiet at the back of the art storage room, next to the hole they have made in the wall to reach the radio wires—alone for now, perhaps not for long. They have only so much time, can afford only so many hesitations. Miller glances at Clarke, still grudging, and asks, "Is that even possible?" 

"If you came in through the tunnels," she answers, leaning in over Maya's shoulder so Bellamy can hear. "It might be." 

"We have to make it work somehow," Bellamy says. A crackle of static distorts the channel, an uncertainty as of movement, or an exhale of breath, on the other end, and then his voice comes into focus again. "We've almost figured out a peace deal with the Grounders. Kane thinks they'd be open to an alliance, if it means getting their people out of Mount Weather, too. But it doesn't matter what kind of army we have if we can't take down their defenses. As long as the acid fog is working, we won't even make it to the door." 

"You know that we're already in here, right?" Jasper says, and again the connection turns briefly fuzzy and distant, and Clarke finds herself picturing the army at the gate. The Outsiders. She's never seen one face to face but she's heard stories. They’re little more than legends passed in whispers, of course, and she knows better than to quake before them, knows she'll never sort out what is true—that they are savage and warlike, radiation-distorted, grown wild and angry on the post-war Earth—and what is only propaganda, even if she someday sees a horde of them descending through the halls. Still her heart clutches briefly in her chest. She is talking about opening the door and letting them, and worse, the outside air, rush in. 

But then she always knew she would die underground. 

Not like this, though, and not so soon. Her pure survival instinct rebels, all adrenaline and fire. 

In its wake a shining bright surface of certainty remains, untarnished by fear. 

She is standing by her father's infirmary bed. She can only hold his hand through her hazmat suit, and the sound of his ragged breathing seems to hit her ears on a delay. _Don't ever believe, Clarke, that there is only one way_ , he'd told her. _Don't let yourself believe there are no choices. Sometimes doing the right thing has great cost_ _—_ _but it's still the right thing._

So she takes what she knows and she twists it around, and she turns it away from herself, and she thinks that the right thing is Maya, linking their fingers together, risking her life for Clarke's: Maya and her friends who need to survive, whose survival needs to feel like her own survival, who need to come first now, above all others, above herself, above everyone she’s ever known. 

"Bellamy's right," Maya says, and her voice is so sharp that Clarke snaps immediately back to herself. "They've already taken Harper. We don't know how much time we have. We need a Plan B." 

"You need to tell your people," Clarke adds, hitting a matching strident note, letting it fill her. "You need to tell them that your friends in the Mountain are already on borrowed time. President Wallace won't harm you. But his son is looking to take over and if that happens tomorrow—" 

"Then we end up in cages," Monty finishes. 

"Exactly." Clarke steps forward, takes the radio from him. Her tongue flicks out across her lips before she speaks again, a half-breath to form the words and for that half-moment, she remembers herself in the doorway of the smallest classroom on Level 4, the sharp rumor-spiked voice of her friend, the son of one of Cage Wallace's men, grating along her ear. Just gossip, he said, but on good authority. _Dr. Tsing's been saying we can live on the surface again. Something about stunning new advances, new records, something about bone marrow, whatever that means._

She's studied medicine more than he has. She knows what it means. 

Her tongue flicks out, and wets her bottom lip. "There are people down here who will do anything to get to the ground. Anything. And you, all of you—you aren't a better radiation treatment. You're a _cure_ —" 

* 

Peter Colton is pacing, and pacing, while everyone else in the room remains unnaturally still. Maya fists her hands in her skirt, just above the knee. Miller and Monty are sitting on either side of her on the couch, and the rest of their friends—she doesn't know. They broke away in the hall, scattered in pairs and trios and groups, and now, she can only hope that they are safely hidden, too; can only fear that they have been captured and caged. 

Bellamy has made it into the Mountain by now, possibly Raven, too; the Grounder army is arrayed outside the doors. 

Abby Griffin is serving them tea as if they were her guests. 

"Why are you helping us?" Maya asks her, so abruptly that even Peter's agitated movements cease. "Other than because of Clarke." 

She expects Abby will say something about _doing the right thing_ , but instead, she pauses for a long moment, then slowly sinks back into her chair. Her hands settle, so lightly that they only graze against the wood, just barely so on the armrests of her chair. 

"It's difficult," she answers, then, "to be selfless when it means your own life. The survival instinct is too strong. But I can't look at your faces and not do what I can to keep you safe." She hesitates. "It's too easy to think, any one of you could be my child." 

So there it is, the thinness of the line. The difference between a face that is visible, and one that is hidden. Maya feels no animosity toward her, cannot be so prideful and so naive as to think that there is only right and wrong in every messy, indefinite, daily decision and omission, and yet. A queasy, uncertain feeling grips her, when she thinks that Abby has survived on Grounder blood. That Clarke has survived only because of Grounder blood. She's traced the port embedded in her skin. She's wondered at it, and she's felt the warmth of Clarke's hands, brought to life between her hands, seen the high rose color of her cheeks in certain private moments, seen every bit of life in her and never thought of it as borrowed, as contingent, as dearly paid. Has never wondered at the cost. 

But now, because it is her own life, a price to be exacted from her, the bargain seems monstrous. Vile, as maggots crawling across skin, as empty bodies thrown into the trash. 

A flurry of violent knocking sounds at the door. Everyone in the room jumps. The teacup in Monty's hand rattles against its saucer, and he abruptly sets it down. 

No one attempts any further movement, as if some animal instinct inside them were telling them to play dead. But the knocking only pauses for a moment, then resumes. At the second round, Abby jumps up to her feet. "Go," she whispers to them, and the urgency of her voice makes Maya more fearful than the knocking does, makes her realize all at once that she has to be brave. "Go. Hide." 

Miller and Peter run for Abby's room, and Maya takes Monty's wrist and pulls him toward Clarke's. They dive into the closet and pull the door shut. There in the back of the dark and stuffy space, surrounded by clothes that make small, faintly metallic sounds, faintly susurrus sounds—the clack of the hangers, the rustle of cloth—as she and Monty hide themselves against the back wall, she worries that she has forgotten how to breathe. She holds Monty's hand so tightly that her own begins to hurt. 

From the main room come loud, angry noises, voices barking out words she cannot discern. The loud stomp of boots. Sounds of destruction, and a violent search. 

Closer, just next to her, the rasping, desperate outtakes of Monty's breath, and closer still, the horrid, dangerous beating of her heart. 

The powerful steps of boots coming closer, throwing open the door to Clarke's room, and Monty's hand sweating as it presses tight against her hand. 

They are going to be caught. They will be dragged away. 

But—instead—a cacophony of noise from the next room: what must be first the banging open of a door, then shouting, a flurry of voices and feet. She recognizes Peter's voice, then another that must be the growl of the guard, and then the second guard, her own, runs out of Clarke's room. Next to her, Monty collapses against the wall. Her own knees are shaking. She can hear the drag of Miller's heels against the floor, how he, or perhaps Peter, flails with all four limbs against the walls. She is so sure that she will vomit; she can taste the bile in her throat. 

The sounds recede. Not quite silence. She breathes slow and deep and keeps her eyes closed. 

A single gunshot in the next room. 

Then long moments of nothing at all. 

She has to drag Monty out of the closet, her hand an iron grip around his wrist. She has to drag him past Abby's body. It is lying, splayed, across the couch, her arm fallen limply over the side, her fingers grazing against the floor. 

She pulls him out into the hall, and pauses, held-breath, too aware that although the path is deserted, there is nowhere left for them to go— 


	5. Chapter 5

The hallways merge together: each one like the last, empty like the last. The scene behind every safe room door: exactly the same. She is lost in her own home. Plagued by the futility of running in a dream. 

Clarke ducks around a corner and flattens herself against the wall, catching her breath as she listens to the announcement over the loudspeakers. The drawling confidence in Cage Wallace's voice makes her ill. She has heard this same speech before and she will hear it again, entranced by the steady rhythm of it, the brash shamelessness of it, the implacable insistence of it. 

"—have murdered our guards and endangered our safety,” he says. And: “We are working to contain the situation. In order to avoid further casualties, please gather in the dining hall on Level Five and remain there until the threat has been eliminated." 

_Murdered our guards. In order to avoid further casualties. Remain on Level Five._

She's holding the radio still gripped in one sweaty hand. She sees it all. How sides have formed, then calcified, then retreated like the edges of a puddle evaporating in the heat. Her people on Level Five. Maya's, collected with brute efficiency, room by room, taken and hidden away. A simple story encompassing them all, the narrative that will drive memory, of enemies and safety and survival against the odds. And all of the hallways seem to blur and combine, each one as abandoned as the last, and at every turn and through every door only emptiness and the bodies left behind. 

She leans in close over the clean bullet hole in Mr. Perkins's forehead, sees the tiny drip of blood and does not see it, and the radio crackles with poor static in her hand. "The Grounders," Bellamy is telling her. She hears him and does not hear him. His words are broken by a hiss and rustle of sound as she forces herself to stand up straight. "—Made a deal—co—der made a deal with your—eople." 

The words repeat in her ear on a frantic spin, a message to decode. She stands frozen and still and listens to them. _Commander_ —that’s one, a word distorted and sliding in upon itself. 

_The Commander has made a deal with your people._

"What kind of deal?" she snaps, abruptly, as soon as she understands. 

"The kind of deal—where they walk out the door and we're—screwed." 

Clarke releases her hold on the radio’s talk button long enough to take a deep breath, long enough to listen for the possibility of footsteps in the hall. For this moment, she does not want Bellamy to hear her. She wants utter silence and privacy: necessary conditions for the narrowing of her thoughts. She is not even shocked, because in every empty hallway, with every sickeningly hollow slap of her shoes against the concrete, she wondered where this powerful army was, where the wild, strong, ever-defiant survivors of the irradiated Earth had hidden themselves, what had gone wrong. Her own naivete briefly stuns her. That she should ever have believed the Outsiders could become saviors—that they could owe allegiance to anyone but themselves— That they could be, even for a day, allies of people they so recently called enemies, selfless even in the depths of a nightmare that Clarke's own people caused— 

And for what? When a better option was placed before them— 

She presses down on the talk button again and holds the radio up close against her lips. 

"It's Wallace." 

"What? Clarke—repeat." 

"It's Dante Wallace." She feels a certainty so sharp and all-engrossing that it whites out her anger, and her threatening despair, even the hard edge of her fear. "Not Cage. Cage isn't smart enough for that, and neutralizing the Outsiders, basically our biggest weapon—that's smart. If they have your friends, they don't need Outsider blood anyway." 

Over the radio, only a faint crackle, like breathing, like movement. Clarke waits a long moment, finally finds herself on the verge of speaking again— 

Then Bellamy's voice, steady and serious, only seeming to waver with peripheral noise. "What does it mean—that Wallace is in on this?" 

"It means he's committed to Cage's plan." 

In the doorway, she looks right and left, but the Mountain feels already like the ghost town it will soon be. 

"I thought you said—ally?" 

"I don't know—" 

Maybe not anymore. Or maybe he’s the only slight hope in a path that seems to narrow and to darken at every turn— 

She's in her living room. She's on her knees on the floor. Not crying, at first, not realizing she has started to cry until she tastes the salt dripping onto her bottom lip, and the radio has dropped from her hands. And now everything is numb: thin tracks of tears down her face but she's not sad, only deadened. Grotesquely attuned to a few precise and crystalline thoughts. That her mother is dead. Still she is not surprised, having walked in upon scene after scene of death, and yet she cannot understand; she must kneel next to her mother's body while the rest of the Mountain and its visitors, its invaders, its victims, huddle down in their encampments, take their prisoners, plan their vengeance. She must kneel and wait in this deep pit of quiet and stillness, until she can focus on these thoughts, abjectly awful as they are. 

That her mother is dead. And Maya has been captured. And she herself, Clarke, will be shot and killed as a traitor. 

She's heard the speech before, this hard and even propaganda, over the loudspeaker, and she'll hear it again. 

_Remain on Level Five. The threat will be eliminated._

She can still feel the salt drying on her cheeks. 

She has nowhere to go, so she goes where her last friends will be. They are the only people in the whole vast and unknowable earth whom she cares to see before she dies. And if a part of her is planning wild and impossible escapes it is only because she has nothing left to lose. 

She has nowhere to go. 

She's standing pressed against the wall outside the dorms and inside, around the edge of the open door, someone she does not know is screaming. Carefully, she peeks around the corner. The scene inside, the young woman writhing, crying, the rows of victims chained against the wall: all sickening, all ruinous. Yet her eyes scan every detail. Weak points. Vulnerabilities. Possibilities. Endings. She sees Jasper, Miller, Harper. Other space station survivors she knows, a few she doesn't. 

She sees that Bellamy is not among them. Neither is Monty. Nor Maya. 

Two possibilities, then: they are already dead. Or they are still free. 

Following this blinding and exhilarating wave of hope, because until it is extinguished, she cannot throw herself away, she turns back toward the hall. The radio is no longer in her hand. She starts to run. Just before she reaches the corner, a young man in scrubs, pushing a metal cart, exits the room behind her and stops up short. 

When she hears him—the rattling of his cart, the clack of glass against glass—she halts, and slowly turns around. 

She expects him to scream, but he does not scream. Too surprised, perhaps, too stunned. And because she cannot let herself be seen, cannot let herself be captured yet—she takes him out. A knee to the stomach, a well-aimed elbow to the back, and he's down, he’s slumped against the floor. 

On top of the cart is a long, metal tray, and on the tray are a dozen dark red vials. Clarke has no time before she has to run, or be captured, or be killed, but still for what feels like a long handful of seconds, she stares at the deep, live color of the marrow. A magic elixir. The product of an unforgivable sin. 

She overturns the cart and, in the aftermath, amid the shattering of glass, the reverberation of metal, the scuffling of feet sliding and tripping over each other beyond the door, she gathers her strength and she runs, faster than she has ever run before. 

* 

This is the end of the story, the guttering out of the path. 

Maya does not see her life flash before her eyes—she is not about to die—rather, everything that has come before starts to dim, to fall away into inscrutable shadows. Behind her, the past is an unlit forest at night, a closed door. Even the events of the last few hours feel no more real than Tesla Station or the dropship camp. 

No more than a tale she will tell herself one day. 

She and Monty in the elevator, her fingers hovering above the buttons, and the doors about to close. He suggested they try the control room. If nothing else, they'd have surveillance on the rest of the Mountain, and access to the computer system, and from this, perhaps, a little power if they could grab it. 

They found the door open, and Bellamy inside, with his weapon trained on Dante Wallace's heart. 

The rapport of the gun. 

The bank of computer screens, each buzzing with stillness, nothingness, all of them the same, except for two: their window onto Cage Wallace's makeshift torture chamber and the scene in the dining room on Level Five. The jumping gray-blue of the images seemed distorted as if by the passage of time itself, as if she were on the Ark again, watching movies made before the bombs—all at once as passive as an audience member, as tall and as removed and as powerful, even, as a god. And next to her, Monty’s slow and tentative voice, suggesting using the power of gods. 

She heard her own voice, as if it were another's, express a horror that she felt only distantly, a horror crying out from the end of a losing war. She had known already a long time that the Mountain Men were never meant to live upon the ground. Their grotesque experiments were only the expression of their hubris, a delaying of the inevitable, a chipping away of themselves— _what else should we have done?_ Clarke had asked once, in defiance, and Monty’s answer had never fully left Maya’s mind. 

She heard herself protest and knew that she would lose, not because her own people must win and there was no other path for them, but because the Mountain Men themselves had raised the stakes to these heights. One winner and one loser and the line between them starkly drawn. The very simplicity of the plan—reverse the oxygen scrubbers, irradiate Level Five, where everyone had gathered as if they had purposefully led themselves to their own slaughter—gave it the shine of the inevitable. A massacre, a room of terrors, a sin not to be sustained—a straight line to salvation, an arrow-shot of retribution to the heart. 

"You can't," she said, and did not feel it, felt only a sullen collapse within herself. A powerlessness. 

On the screen, two guards marching in, leading two prisoners in front of them. Octavia, nearly unrecognizable in Grounder clothes and braids—and Clarke. 

"There's no other option," Bellamy snapped. Defensive, fighting, so much harder than she was, the same type of war within himself. "They have Octavia." 

"They have _Clarke_!" 

Behind them, Monty's fingertips clacking across the keys. Her own lungs narrowing, her breaths becoming shallow, the crush of inevitability itself within her chest. Futile arguments, and the end she always knew would come to her, in time. 

The static-blue of the surveillance images, and Clarke and Octavia forced to their knees; the slump of Bellamy's shoulders. The low and apologetic tone of his voice: "You still have time." 

_Go to her_ , he meant—to save her or say goodbye, she did not ask. 

Every swerve around every corner made her stomach lurch, and she could only think, not of an invisible clock, counting down with invisible numbers, but of the last moment before she left the room, her final glance at the screen, and how for a second she thought that Clarke met the camera's gaze and solemnly, briefly, nodded her head. But this must have been only a trick, a confusion in her mind. Something Maya imagined in the tumult and confusion of events, nearly at their peak, ready to tumble toward their end. 

Now here she is at the last moment of clarity and silence, her appearance so stunning that not even the Guards have moved to contain her, everyone staring at her as she catches her breath. She looks at Clarke as if she could read the obscure, defiant expression on her face, just as easily as she has already memorized its beauty. 

Here she is in the last moment of stillness before, somewhere she cannot see, Bellamy and Monty turn the Mountain inside out. 

She is standing at the end of the war, at her victory in the war, in a room that will become the gravesite of her enemies. Their skin boils and erupts in horrendous, red sores. Their lungs struggle to breathe. Bodies slump forward, fall forward; limbs twitch. The guards are now the only ones on their knees. Level Five smells now of rancid flesh, undercut with the purity of surface air, new world air, the toxic air that once sustained her and will do so again. Because she's won. They've won, and they're going home. 

She reaches out for Clarke, for the painful, sharp, sickening finality of goodbye— 

And she finds her, instead, standing, unburdened, unscarred, and breathing free. On her face is an expression of apology and sorrow, undiluted by guilt. Maya's knees feel so weak that for a second, she falters in her steps and almost falls. 

Clarke is holding her hand, the crushing strength of her fingers powerful enough to bruise. 

She does not break eye contact as, with her free hand, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out an empty glass vial. A few small red droplets still cling to the inside. For a moment, Maya thinks that she will give it to her, but instead, she lets it fall, and it shatters into pieces at their feet. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Come say hi on tumblr [@kinetic-elaboration](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com). This fic has two accompanying moodboards, one [general](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/615610846479089664/the-end-of-the-story-clarkemaya-15k-5-chapters), and one [Clarke-specific](https://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/post/189968390210/clarke-griffin-of-mount-weather-from-the-end-of).


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